To all commentators here, a big Thanks for giving me so much!

A Happy New Year to all moonkind!

Updated below

President Kibaki appointed 19 of the 21 electoral commissioners earlier this year. One of the new commissioners is Mr Kibaki’s personal lawyer.
Kenya in flames over ‘stolen election’, Independent, Dec 31, 2007

In one area, Mr. Kibaki received 105,000 votes, even though there were only 70,000 registered voters. In another, the vote tally was changed, at the last minute, to give the president an extra 60,000 votes. In a third area, the turnout was reported at 98 percent.
Riots Batter Kenya as Rivals Declare Victory, NYT, Dec 30, 2007

The US State Department Sunday congratulated Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on his re-election, and called on all sides to accept the results despite opposition allegations of ballot fraud.
US congratulates Kenyan president on re-election, AFP, Dec 30, 2007

The EU observer mission cited the example of Molo constituency, where its monitors saw the official tally for Kibaki in the presidential poll marked at 50,145. But when the national election commission announced the results on television yesterday Kibaki was given 75,621 votes.
Kenyans riot as Kibaki declared poll winner, Guardian, Dec 31, 2007

U.S. Ambassador Michael E. Ranneberger said that although there were "problems with the process," the United States would accept Kivuitu’s announcement.

"Look at the U.S.," he said, just before Kivuitu announced the results. "The results are often disputed, and if there’s a dispute, there are the courts.
Incumbent Declared Winner in Kenya’s Disputed Election, WaPo, Dec 31, 2007

The opposition has not indicated if it will contest the results in Kenya’s courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt.
Tribal Rivalry Boils Over After Kenyan Election, NYT, Dec 31, 2007

UPDATE:
As b real lets us know in the comments, the U.S. State Department now has made a 180 degree turn and retracted its congratulations to Kibaki. (Can Rice get anything right?).
So lets add this to the above:

The US State Department expressed "serious concerns" on Monday about Kenya’s disputed presidential vote and withdrew its congratulations to the re-elected leader, Mwai Kibaki.
…
Despite foreign concern about the vote, expressed notably by European Union monitors, State Department spokesperson Rob McInturff on Sunday had congratulated Kibaki and called on all sides in Kenya to accept the results.

Rowing back, Casey told reporters on Monday that any sense that the United States was happy with the election was an "error".
US withdraws congratulations, AFP, Dec 31, 2007

Foot in mouth – indeed …

More at b real’s collection of election news from Kenia here and down in this thread.

Was I wrong declaring that There is no “new progressive movement” in the U.S.? 

A very fine piece by Lambert shows the insight and spirit needed for a progressive movement.

It is mostly directed against Obama’s "reach out" to conservatives and it includes this fine historic description of how the conservatives bought Washington to plunder the U.S. people:

Starting in the 1970s, at about the time of the Lewis Powell memo, an interlocking network of right wing billionaires and theocrats began to fund the institutions whose dominance we take for granted today: The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Family Research Council, the Federalist Society, the Brookings Institute (over time), and on and on.
…
For these billionaires, the ROI of the Conservative Movement is absolutely spectacular. At the micro level, for example, if you want to create an aristocracy, then you want to eliminate any taxes on inherited wealth, despite what Warren Buffet or Bill Gates might say about the values entailed by that project. So, the Conservative Movement goes to work, develops and successfully propagates the term “death tax” — which they may even believe in, as if sincerity were the point — and voila!

Whoever thought that “family values” would translate to “feudal values” and dynastic wealth? At the macro level, their ROI has been spectacular as well. Real wages have been flat for a generation; unions have been disempowered; the powers of corporations greatly increased; government has become an agent for the corporations, rather than a protector of the people; the safety net has been shredded; and so on and on and on.

Lambert’s correct conclusion – you can not work with these folks. To reach out to them (Obama) is fruitless. To work within their system (Clinton) will never destroy it. To fight it (Edwards) is the only option.

Such insight is the first step to develop a creed.

But I still miss
a clear and broad call to raise taxes on the rich, to dismantle the military-industrial complex – the two most obvious things to do
– and to use the proceeds for universal healthcare and free education.

With regard to foreign policy there is still too much of a tendency to -very selectively- meddle everywhere where ‘human rights’ are not what some ‘progressives’ envision them to be (compare the talk on Darfur and Israel).

The conservative strategy Lambert explains correctly is not only directed against the U.S. people. It is part of a bigger scheme to rule and plunder the world.

On the domestic issues u.S. progressives do get it right. In the foreign policy field, they take part in the right’s machinations.

Seven of ten of Edwards’ foreign policy and security advisers are former generals and admirals. That quota does not point to peace.

Can we please add a bit of Ron Paul isolationism to this?

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called for an independent, international investigation into the death of one million Iraqis — perhaps by the United Nations — saying Friday there was "no reason to trust the U.S. government."
Link

Yes – I misquoted that bit of hypocrisy. It was originally aimed at Pakistan. But there is more of her lunacy:

[W]e need to help them understand what is in their interest and that of course includes President Musharraf.

Sure, we’ll tell these niggers ….

There are lots of ideas out there who and what killed Bhutto.

Bush and Musharraf say Al-Qaida.

Neocon Eli Lake spins this:

The attack yesterday at Rawalpindi bore the hallmarks of a sophisticated military operation. At first, Bhutto’s rally was hit by a suicide bomb that turned out to be a decoy. According to press reports and a situation report of the incident relayed to The New York Sun by an American intelligence officer, Bhutto’s armored limousine was shot by multiple snipers whose armor-piercing bullets penetrated the vehicle, hitting the former premier five times in the head, chest, and neck.

Barnett Rubin thinks Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, but the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud denies any involvement.

Someone speculates about a drug related hit-squad tasked by a former Pakistani General.

Bhutto’s party folks are implicating Musharraf.

Tomorrow a letter from Bhutto herself will be read and it is expected that it will put the blame on Musharraf too (she was also a prophet?).

Officially she died from the bomb blast
that blew her against a handle of her cars sun roof, fracturing her skull. According to the pictures, that is at least a possiblity. But does it matter?

Bhutto orchestrated the killing of her own brother. She supported the Taliban. She stole about $1.5 billion from her people.

Even without the recent political maneuverings there were plenty of motives to kill her and even more possible perpetrators. We will never really know who ordered this.

Any further investigation would be a political football and
abused to serve this or that policy purpose (think Hariri in Beirut).

This is one of these political assassination that will never be solved in a way that satisfies all doubters. It will forever spin myriads of conspiracy theories (think Kennedy in Dallas).

So what do you think: Did China do it? How was India involved?

Bush is suddenly vetoing the $696 billion military authorization bill he had already agreed to:

[O]n Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Mr. Bush announced that he
was vetoing a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure
provision that could expose Iraq’s new government to billions of dollars in legal claims dating to Saddam Hussein’s rule.

The pocket veto Bush is using here is legally dubious as it requires that Congress has adjourned. The Senate has not adjourned and is formally kept in session by the Democrats.

Officially the president is reasoning that a part of the bill would allow legal claims from victims of Saddam against money Iraq has parked in the U.S. Such, he says, would hurt Iraq’s reconstruction. (Iraq has $20-30 billion cash parked in the U.S., but is halving peoples food rations for lack of money?).

The NYT quotes someone who should know and who claims Bush’s reasoning is nonsense:

Meanwhile, a Washington lawyer who has represented Americans who were abducted by Iraqi forces after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait said that he doubted the official explanation for President Bush’s rejection of the bill.

This very late and unusual action against a bill which has wide majority support smells of panic. But panic about what?

A reader at Hullabaloo suggests:

I suspect that the key to the pocket veto has nothing to do with Iraqi assets. Rather, it is contained a little line buried in the last paragraph of the Memorandum of Disapproval: "… I continue to have serious objections to other provisions of this bill, including section 1079 relating to intelligence matters . . ."

That passage of the law (search for HR 1585) says:

SEC. 1079. COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE COMMITTEES ON ARMED SERVICES OF THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

(a) Requests of Committees- The Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the Director of a national intelligence center, or the head of any element of the intelligence community shall, not later than 45 days after receiving a written request from the Chair or ranking minority member of the Committee on Armed Services of the Senate or the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives for any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate, or legal opinion relating to matters within the jurisdiction of such Committee, make available to such committee such assessment, report, estimate, or legal opinion, as the case may be.

Possible requests from Congress would include full National Intelligence Estimates, like the one on Iran, and legal opinions on torture or phone tapping, i.e. the FISA circumventions.

Congress has inherent authority to request such reports and opinions, but the administration has often blocked these anyway. The law would give Congress explicit statutory authority to obtain them, i.e. a much firmer legal case.

Dave Addington, Cheney’s lawyer, certainly didn’t like that prospect.

The Scanner tries to explain Why the “new progressive movement” is fucked

So why do I say that the new progressive movement is fucked? Because they have no ideology. They lack any semblance of a creed. Now, naturally, the progressives would vigorously dispute this. Of course we have a creed! We believe in universal healthcare, combating global warming, protecting the right to abortion… [etc., ad infinitum] But that’s not a creed, it’s a list of policies.
…
The minute these new progressives try to put their creed into words, it melts into a flavorless mush of insensible campaign rhetoric, …

My reading of the U.S. ‘left’ is very different.

These ‘liberals’, the Scanner uses the Center for American Progress as an example, ain’t ‘liberals’ at all. Their creed is the same the right has.

The health care plans the Democratic candidates offer now are to the right of Nixon’s plans. What is liberal with that?

Foreign policy? Matt Stoller at OpenLeft says We Should Stay the $#$&* Out of Pakistan but writes:

While we have a checkered history in terms of our involvement in the
affairs of other countries since World War II, the last seven years
have been nothing short of horrendous.  We ought to stop the meddling
in other countries business until we fix our national security and
diplomatic apparatus.

Reread Stoller’s last sentence "… until we fix our national security and diplomatic apparatus."

What fix would that be? And why would a fix of the national security apparatus justify international meddling. What security interests would be served by that? What is liberal in that?

This is laughingly insincere.

Juan Cole, in a piece about the Bhutto killing, yesterday wrote this:

Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built
between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy
security of the United States.

Why is Iranian gas for India "central"(!) to U.S. energy security? What lunacy is this? Liberal creed?

The ‘liberals’ have basicly the same creed the right has. They can’t say
so openly. Instead they market the few policy points in which they differ a tiny
bit from the right.

But the Scanner thinks the deeper reason for the lack of liberal creed is this:

[I]f liberals
tried honestly to formulate
their principles in abstract terms, they would quickly discover how
poorly they echo the American vernacular. Many swing-voting Americans
would simply recoil from them. After all, Americans are, in the famous
phrase, programmatically liberal but ideologically conservative.

This is wrong in all three points.

One can define ‘freedom’ as economic liberty to run whatever business one likes, as is usually done today in the U.S. policy argumentations. Or one can define freedom as ‘freedom from want’,  a far more liberal term that includes universal healthcare and other progressive policies. ‘Freedom from want’ certaily also echos the American vernacular. Packaged correctly,  one can be progressive AND ideologically conservative.

Swing-voters can never be the benchmark for any policy or creed. To cater to them is weak and insincere. If one does so, one is immediately and rightfully distrusted as lacking a backbone – this especially by the swing voters. Triangulation and serving swing voters is what dragged ‘liberals’ to the right. It is the central illness of the ass party.

If you want to broaden your voter base, why not look where most of the potential votes really are? These are with the people who today do not vote. Those are mostly the poor, the disenfranchised, the people who have no reason to vote because the ‘liberals’ are not really different from the ‘conservatives’.

The lack of creed of the ‘liberals’ in U.S. policy isn’t the problem. The problem is the lack of real liberals.

The "new progressive movement" isn’t fucked. It doesn’t exist.

When traveling in the US (and UK), I find that certain installations in hotel rooms and private homes should be continentalized.

• Rotatory switches on floor and bedside lamps – too flimsy and often ramshackly.
• Double hung sash windows – the maximum opening is only half of the total window size.
• Door knobs – impracticle when you carry something (and often also quite rickety.)

As McClatchy reports, the last item is changing:

The compelling argument for door levers is a practical one: When you’re struggling with too many bags or with arthritis, the lever’s easy-release mechanism sparks a little gratitude. Heck, an elbow works when your hands are full. Knobs, on the other hand, provoke no emotion other than frustration.

[L]evers now account for 15 percent of U.S. door-opener sales for homes, according to hardware industry surveys, and double that in the market’s high end.

There is of course no technical reason to price levers higher than doorknobs. They need just as much material and manufacturing process.

Pakistan’s Bhutto killed by bombing

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan – Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide bombing that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, a party aide and a military official said.

First thoughts:

1. Who did it?

Many people will point to Musharraf, as being behind the assassination, but according to the BBC, someone shot Bhutto and then blew himself up. Suicide bombing is not the hallmark of the Pakistani military, but of the takfiris.

Bhutto had promised to fight the U.S.’s war of terror against the Taliban and takfiris in the tribal North West Frontier State, certainly reason enough for those folks to kill her.

Then again, the big winner in this is Musharraf.

2. What will happen to the election?

According to polls, Bhutto’s PPP party would have gotten some 30% of the votes, the PML-N of Saudi favorite Nawaz Sharif 25% and Musharraf’s PML-Q 23%.

Without Bhutto the PPP will have much less ‘pull’ and the race will most likely go to Sharif. But as he has more or less promised to oust Musharraf for his blantant illegal behaviour, we can expect that Musharraf will find ways to prevent such an outcome. I expect him to find a puppet to set up as prime minister and keep the reins in his hands.

3. U.S. relations

The U.S. backing of Bhutto put huge pressure on Musharraf. Support for U.S. policies in Pakistan is about zero. Musharraf is now again free to take the popular stand of independence from U.S. policies. The pressure point the U.S. has left is the money it pays to the Pakistani military. But that is a weak point, as any operation in Afghanistan is impossible without logistic support through Pakistan. Take away the Pakistani military’s money and the Afghanistan operation will have to  top.

Short of an unlikely military coup against Musharraf, I currently see no way how the U.S. can again get the upper hand over him. The bribing of the tribes and planed operation of U.S. special forces in North Western Frontier may have ended before they really started.

[Let’s open the War on Christmas 2008 right away. Don’t ever let Bill O’Reilly catch breath on the issue.
b.]

The ‘Merry’ in ‘Christmas’

by anna missed
lifted from a comment

So as I left the gas station tonight, the clerk said "Merry
Christmas". I’m not (really) sure what he was talking about. Because,
no one ever says "merry" about anything else, like have a merry time,
or merry day, or even merry holiday.

Come to think about it, I can’t
remember the last time I heard somebody say "merry" anything, except in
connection to Christmas. So I guess "merry" is suppose to only apply to
Christmas – something about Christmas is suppose to be "merry", but
nothing else qualifies in distinction, as in the sense of have a
"happy" new year, or birthday.

You might think then that "merry" in
definition is only intrinsically connected to Christmas, but no, the
dictionary definition of merry is:

1. Full of high-spirited gaiety; jolly.
2. Marked by or offering fun and gaiety; festive: a merry evening.
3. Archaic. Delightful; entertaining.
4. Brisk: a merry pace.

Not exactly anything sacred there, or special to Christmas. So
whats the deal? Why has the word merry been enslaved to exclusive usage
for one religious holiday a year, and its generic usage rendered odd,
and in spite of the fact we all know its real meaning, but yet refuse
to use it as such? And you know, you too – haven’t used the word merry
outside of Christmas now have you?

My own personal (war on the war on Christmas) conspiracy theory
about this particular minutia begins with the "war on Christmas"
propaganda started in the wingnut sphere. Supposedly, that people (of
the left wing variety) are trying to get people to stop using the
phrase "Merry Christmas" and substitute the phrase "Happy Holidays"
instead. That somehow its the liberal left that is trying to
delegitimize the sacred birth of Christ holiday.

However, according to Amish Aunt Tilly
Amish Christians do not really "celebrate" Christmas (or Santa Clause,
or trees with lights for that matter), but rather "observe" it. Which
is of course, a far cry from "Merry Christmas" in the conventional
American sense of the phrase.

Seeing that both words Merry and
Christmas, like so many other American religious observations have
evolved so far from their original ritual content and into a virtual
dead language iconographical reconstructions dedicated to totemic
commercialism – as to become devoid of secular content. And instead
have become replicated icons that people acknowledge to one another as
tacit unacknowledged but mutual subserviance to something else
altogether.

The non-negotiable American way of life. Thats what
fighting against the so called "war on Christmas" is all about – to
keep the meaningless "merry" in the the reformulated (and equally
meaningless) notion of "Christmas" intact.

Merrill Lynch announced Monday that Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd., a Singapore state-owned investment group, was buying a 4.4-billion-dollar shareholding in the company.

The deal follows hot on the heels of Morgan Stanley’s announcement last week that the China Investment Corporation (CIC) had obtained a five-billion-dollar stake in the firm.
…
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority of the United Arab Emirates grabbed a hefty 7.5-billion-dollar shareholding in Citigroup last month.
…

CIC grabbed a three-billion-dollar stake in the Blackstone Group, a large private equity firm, earlier this year and China’s CITIC Securities Company Ltd. bought a six percent shareholding in Bear Stearns, another troubled US investment house, for one billion dollars in October.

Analysts believe more deals are likely, especially as the foreign funds are sitting on huge cash stockpiles.
Asian, Mideast funds unleash cultural revolution on Wall St., December 25, 2007

"A country that is now aspiring to an ‘Ownership Society’ will not find happiness in–and I’ll use hyperbole here for emphasis–a ‘Sharecropper’s Society,’" Buffett wrote, "But that’s precisely where our trade policies, supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, are taking us."
Buffett: Berkshire Hathaway CEO Blasts ‘Sharecropper’s Society’, March 7, 2005

New U.S. aid is planed for the North Western Frontier States in Pakistan according to this NYT piece.

The frontier states are Pashtun (or Pathan) land that was never ruled by anyone than the Pashtun themselves. These people are not exactly friends of the U.S. government which kills their brethren on the other side of the Durand line. A border the Pashtuns never recognized anyway. The Taliban in Pakistan are now under unified command and on the offensive. Their fighters are people from the tribes. So does this have any chance of success?

First a look at the numbers:

The disputes have left many skeptical that the $750 million five-year plan can succeed in competing for the allegiance of an estimated 400,000 young tribesmen in the restive tribal region …

A $150 million per year sounds like a lot of money. But later in the piece we learn:

The region of 3.2 million people has no industry, virtually no work and no hope. Men aged 18 to 25, who are the target of the program, find offers of 300 rupees a day from the Taliban — about $5 — attractive.

The NYT doesn’t do the math, but $150 million per year divided by 400,000 recipients and 365 days per year results in $1.03 per day per person. Say’s Pashtun junior: "Why should I work for so little money? The Talibs pay $5 per day. Besides that, shooting is much more fun than building roads."

Cont. reading: Bunkum Pakistan Aid

The old story associated with Bethlehem and commemorated by many these days is about hope.

Hope for more light and new beginnings, needed as much today than ever.

Somehow the days seem to get longer again. There is no eternal darkness?

Then these walls will come down again too.

I wish you all some contemplative, hope- and peaceful holidays.

Picture courtesy of the Bethlehem Association

Harpers’ Scott Horton has an update on the kangaroo court set up in Iraq to find Associated Press photojournalist Bilal Hussein guilty of whatever is convenient to the Pentagon. Bilal Hussein has been jailed by the U.S. military for nineteen month without trial.

Bilal’s case has been assigned to investigating Judge Dhia al-Kinani, who has already conducted a long series of evidentiary hearings in the case. The source said the Pentagon is confident that they will secure a conviction in the case. “Nothing is being left to chance in this case. It’s important and a lot of resources are being thrown at it.”
…
The U.S. military has assigned a team of five to act effectively as prosecutors in the case. The team is headed by a JAG Captain named Kelvey. (Says the source: “We recognize, of course, that the U.S. has no authority to prosecute a case in an Iraqi court. That’s one of the reasons that a gag order was essential.”)

You should read the whole piece as I only have a minor point.

Who is "a JAG Captain named Kelvey"? Google comes up empty for "Kelvey JAG", "Kelvey Iraq", etc.

But what about Captain Kevin Calvey, who has a J.D. from Georgetown University and is currently in Baghdad?

Cont. reading: A JAG Captain named Kelvey?

Open thread – your comments, news & views are welcome …

Monolycus reminds us of the famous quote from Eisenhower’s farwell address:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

In a recent report Jason Sigger, at Wired’s Danger Room blog, had a good example on how far the democratic process has already been shunned in favor of the military industrial complex. A compromise over a $300 and a $350 bill version ending up with a price tag of $510.

Cont. reading: Military-Industrial Miracles

No real post today as I’m busy building a race car. A present for a dear friend of mine. Like usual, the bricolage takes longer than expected.

Thereafter a USB-memory stick will have to be dismantled and then fitted into a Lego brick. Actally two of those, in his/her colors. Should I put music on them?

That will be all.

Oh, you want to read some serious stuff?
Take a look at the London Review of Books. On the Credit Crunch includes some perspective on the London City and London’s rotten housing market.

‘So we’ll have to stop running around spending money like drunken sailors,’ I said. ‘Well, drunk sailors tend to be spending their own money,’ Tony said. ‘By contemporary standards they’re quite prudent.’

Or a Diary from Afghanistan, from the last issue, Tarik Ali on the Bhuttos.

Then again, lets talk about presents.

What do you give? What do you get, or don’t? How do you feel about it/them?

There is this awesome trend I spotted.

First I thought it was unreal, that there was no trend at all, just a random deviation from what I considered to be normal.

But then, in July, about the same time as this surge thing took off in Iraq, I started to make notes about this phenomenon. You know, really writing down my observation every day. Even more, I did it twice a day.

Every morning I wrote down the time the sun went up. Every evening I documented when it went down.

Cont. reading: Trends and the Garden of Eden

Paul Krugman laments about the ideology that drove the stock and mortgage bubble:

Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says — meaning taxpayer money — “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.

Dear Paul, I don’t find this puzzling at all.

2008 Election Cycle:
Finance/Insurance/Real Estate:

Long-Term Contribution Trends
Donations to Democrats $79,749,633
Donations to Republicans $66,274,624

Top 20 Senators
1 Clinton, Hillary (D) $12,302,928
2 Obama, Barack (D) $9,834,870
3 Dodd, Christopher J (D) $5,212,168
4 McCain, John (R) $5,208,827
5 Biden, Joseph R Jr (D) $1,321,819

The ‘opponents’ economic beliefs’ are the same believes the top dog Democrats have. It is what pays their campaigns. Like the repubs, they will bail out the financial industry with tax money.

To assume something different is like dreaming those Democrats want to get out of Iraq.

It’s an illusory world view.

A followup an my recent Kurdistan post. There might be geopolitics behind the U.S. support for Turkey to bomb north Iraq.

The very next day after those bombings and Turkish incursions, the north Iraq (kurdistan?) ‘premier’ Barzani agreed to move the constitutional demanded referendum over Kirkuk and its oil riches to some never-date.

Even though that very significant bow to U.S. demands was in an AFP release, no U.S. media I read (and I do read a lot of these) reported that point. This was some peace offer by Barzani to the U.S., but it was totally ignored. Why?

Cont. reading: Kurd Infighting – US-China Proxy War?

Commentator UESLA adds points on a creepy process that deserve a lift to the front page.

As preface some observations by me, Bernhard.

From today’s NYT we learn that at least four White House lawyers pondered the question of burning evidence of their crimes by deleting video tapes (I believe there are copies) of the CIA torture on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri:

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The WH lawyers involved were Miers, Bellinger, Gonzales and Addington. Miers and Gonzales are lightweights. I don’t know about Bellinger, but Eddington has been the heavyweight on the team all along. Being Cheney’s henchmen he explained the general overall strategy:

"We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

But what if no larger force appears?

The process is well known:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

That text applies to torture laws, the FISA changes, the Patriot Act and the War on Iraq budgets that still fly through Congress without any significant protest.

But it was written in 1955 and is an interview with an intellectual German about the 1930s/40s. The Goebbels strategy was "push and push and push" too. Back then the larger force appeared only in a very bloody fight over Stalingrad and even after that took years to succeed.

It is the creeping process that is alarming. It is still going on, strong. Several of the last Billmon posts warned about this.

The recent offhanded use of the words "bureau procedures" by the veteran reporter Walter Pincus to describe serious enacted laws really set off my alarm bells.

The creeping slime has seeped into the better folks minds. UESLA goes from there:
—

This is a difficult phase during our nation’s rise to imperial
glory. The transition from the rule of law to the rule of Strong Men
requires, at times, the utmost patience from true patriots.

It is not something that happens overnight, although it will seem like that when it finally blossoms into full view.

Although done without fanfare, it is an absolutely vital step to
refer to laws prohibiting torture as mere procedures. It is masterful.
It is well over 51% of the victory, for it quietly and adroitly hollows
out those laws. They no longer quite apply, and laws that no longer
quite apply — quite effectively no longer exist.

There are dumb laws
in every State of the Union forbidding various things like eating ice
cream on Sunday, using elephants to plow cotton fields, or keeping
horses indoors. No one pays any attention to them, other than to
chuckle over their inanity. Laws against torture, and treaties banning
torture, are relentlessly joining this list.

Now that the restraints against torture have been effectively
removed, the next steps will be easy. In the coming few years, this
Mueller fellow will eventually be replaced with someone who is not
hampered by regard for defunct laws, who can rule his domain within the
empire by fiat and decree.

Cont. reading: All Perfectly Predictable